Almost any variety of electronic device, including servers, desktop or laptop computers, mobile devices, or consumer and business electronics, utilize memory resources to store and manage data and code for execution by processing resources. Memory device fabrication process feature geometries continue to shrink, which causes memory densities to continue to increase. However, scaling to higher densities is likely to increase the number of errors in memory devices. One technique for addressing memory errors is to employ ECC (error checking and correction, also referred to as error correction coding). Traditionally a memory controller performs error detection and correction.
However, the use of ECC typically requires exchanging more data bits, which can require a bus width increase and a corresponding change to a memory device data interface. Low power memory devices typically have a x16 interface, or a data bus interface with 16 connectors and corresponding 16 internal data paths. The application of ECC with low power memory devices has thus traditionally involved adding a second device, or adding nearly double the system memory to allow for ECC. While wasteful of the resources, doubling the number of memory devices was traditionally the only practical option, seeing that implementing interface changes to low power memory for purposes of ECC would require significant redesigns to the I/O (input/output) interface of the memory and significant internal redesigns to provide signal lines for the exchange of ECC information.
Thus, for systems where ECC was considered necessary, non-low power memory has traditionally been used. However, there are operating conditions, such as high temperature environments, where low power memory performs better than standard commodity memory. In such systems, low power memory devices were used, and to enable implementing ECC, the system would be deployed with number of devices needed.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the examples described below, as well as discussing other potential examples or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein.